Archive for the 'Go Read This Now' Category

The fatosphere is always talking about how the ‘costs of obesity’ are inflated for shock value and to influence public policy and spending – and at last we have a leading actuary who has confirmed that the costs of Australia have been vastly over-estimated. Instead of $58 billion, he states the actual costs are only $8.8 billion – but I guess that just doesn’t have the same ZING!

A leading actuary has lampooned health lobby figures on the costs of smoking and obesity as being extravagantly inflated and based on suspect methodology.

“The numbers are all over the place,” writes Geoff Dunsford in the September edition of Actuary Australia. And they are “big numbers” – the implication being that they are too big.

and

The sheer size of the numbers, argues the Sydney actuary, perverts government policy. It can lead to poor spending decisions. The credibility of the numbers from the health lobby is therefore critical to government policy.

The press and the public have been led to believe that the costs to the system are higher than they really are so the government can “justify use of taxpayers’ money on measures to reduce its prevalence and prevention”.

and

Access Economics estimated the cost of obesity to Australia at $58.2 billion. And sure enough, this enormous headline number promptly bobbed in the press.

On Dunsford’s analysis, however, the figures are flawed, skewed by the “non-financial” estimates to make obesity seem a lot more costly to the taxpayer than it really is.

The costs break down as $3.9 billion for the health care system, $4.4 billion in “other” costs relating to lost work days, taxes forgone and other productivity losses.

More detailcan be found in the article (Be warned: the comments are full of fat-hate.)

Like this:

Lindsay has a post up discussing the recent conflicts and power struggles in the fatosphere:

There is one thing that FA blogs have in common across the board: we believe that it is wrong to mistreat someone because they are fat. That’s it.

Diversity of opinion is a large part of what I value in the fatosphere. As I’ve said before:

Fat Acceptance is (clearly!) not monolithic. Nor should it be. We have a range of view points, a range of goals, and a range of ideas on how best to achieve those goals. That’s great. Every little raindrop counts.